This Weather Is Literally (Correct Use of “Literally”) the Craziest Thing Ever

What crazy, crazy weather! What magnificent and terrifying weather we are having! This weather is, in the most literal sense, Sublime. To begin, per usual, this Monday morning with a bit of Immanuel Kant: the Sublime is “arouse enjoyment but with horror.” What would Kant say about this weather we’re having? Something like: “A very great height is sublime as well as a very great depth; but the latter is accompanied by the sense of terror, the former by admiration.” And also: “Seventy degrees in New York in late December? Glad I spent a hundred goddamn dollars on cashmere gloves at Barney’s.”

“The temperature in New York's Central Park topped out at 71 degrees on Sunday, breaking a 1998 record of 63 degrees,” The New York Timesreports. The nearby hamlets of Philadelphia and Atlantic City saw record temperatures, too. Meanwhile, slightly to the north, New England and its environs experienced “sleet and freezing rain,” according to USA Today. Quoth a meteorologist: “This morning it was 72 degrees in Newark, New Jersey, and 41 degrees in Boston.” It was “a big, crazy storm of contrasts . . . Records are just being smashed all over the place.”

Note that this also includes the record for “heaviest reliance on Wikipedia in order to ‘brush up on’ Kantian Sublime, subject of study for no fewer than two semesters in college.”